Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham [1]
The circumstances of the book’s composition help to explain its special place among autobiographical novels. In general—no rules without exceptions—autobiographical novels produced by authors at an early age have the strength of intensity and the weakness of self-absorption, while those produced in mid-life lose passion and gain objectivity. Writers in their forties either remember defectively the content of youthful solemnities and aspirations, or they remember well but with embarrassment, and attempt to restrain yesterday’s springy naïveté in corsets of irony. Some measure of the distinction of Maugham’s autobiographical novel can be attributed to its having been composed in youth and reworked in early middle age.
The author finished the first version of the book (titled The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey) at age twenty-three; when publishers rejected it he laid it aside for fifteen years. Throughout much of that period he struggled—and often failed—as a novelist and short story writer. But in his middle thirties he enjoyed a sudden success as a playwright in London and on Broadway, and the attendant publicity (cleverly exploited) transformed W. Somerset Maugham into an icon of cosmopolitan sophistication.
The mind that returned after a decade and a half to the first draft of The Artistic Temperament wasn’t, in short, merely removed from juvenilities; it had endured seasoning by adversity and gone on to win kudos for elegant worldliness. It felt no need to pace off, publicly, the distance between itself and callowness, no obligation to mock a young hero’s jejune self-preoccupation in order to parry charges of egomania. Further good fortune, it was free of the burden of inventing (or laboring to recall) half-forgotten volatility, fervor, or despair. Thanks to the effort of a literary apprentice—the author himself, barely into his twenties—the essential raw stuff already existed in words. And the words in question had been set down at a time when the young writer was totally convinced that all the pertinent feelings, states of mind, and revolutions of belief mattered deeply on their own terms.
On their own terms. It bears strong emphasis that Maugham’s novel registers shaping events and emotions in language commensurate with the electric portentousness those events possess in childhood and youth. The book’s unashamed fullness of feeling is evident almost from the start, when the hero as a griefstruck nine-year-old visits his mother’s bedroom after her death: “Philip opened a large cupboard filled with dresses and, stepping in, took as many of them as he could in his arms and buried his face in them.” And the same intense demonstrativeness is no less evident 500 pages later when, no longer a child, and depressed by his seemingly hopeless prospects, Philip is moved to tears by a Greek bas-relief in the British Museum—an Athenian tombstone that speaks to him of the history of human friendship:
There was one stone which was very beautiful, a bas-relief of two young men holding each other’s hand; and the reticence of line, the simplicity, made one like to think that the author here had been touched with a genuine emotion. It was an exquisite memorial ... to a friendship; and as Philip looked at it, he felt the tears come to his eyes. He thought of Hayward and his eager admiration for him when first they met, and how disillusion had come and then indifference, till nothing held them together but habit and old memories. It was one of the queer